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I think I’m with Dana Goldstein that the way this ad hits Palin is distasteful, but it’s not easy to articulate why. Granted, of course, Palin is a more-than-legitimate target, and The Wink was obnoxious. But in this ad, the Obama team could easily have made their point by using a standard image of Palin. Instead, they chose a famously “feminized” image, suggesting that that’s where the problem lies.

i agree–there is room for caution about not turning anti-palin sentiments into an excuse for misogyny. (see kevin drum on ‘diva’ about this.)

but the point of this obama ad is to stress s.p.’s deep unseriousness.

much of her deep unseriousness his her own self-presentation through various hyper-feminized types, whether the cutsey-poo, the milf, or the hockey-mom. she fosters this; she can’t even present herself as politically aggressive without reminding us that she’s a lip-stick wearing political attack dog.

maybe there are other images that the obama camp could have used which would have said ‘unserious’ without saying ‘hyper-feminine’. but s.p. herself has not given them a lot to work with.

I’m saying they could have used any standard shot of Palin (say, the official portrait) for identification. Ben’s right that her normal self-presentation is cartoonish — but they chose the moment where she suddenly turned it up to 11. The point that needs to be made is that she doesn’t supply McCain’s confessed deficiency. Does the cutesy woman act make that point? Not unless you’re a misogynist — what makes the point is identifying her, because you remember she’s deficient in the relevant respect too.

i think you’re over-stating this. merely putting her social security number on the screen would not do it, and neither would her name. nor, for similar reasons, would an official portrait in which she is looking uncharacteristically serious.

what the ad needs in order to make its point is that she’s not serious. she’s not knowledgeable, thoughtful, or deep; she is a creature of surfaces. this moment captures that.

your view seems to be that showing dukakis in a tank is no more effective than showing him in his official portrait. but if you want to say ‘this guy is not ready to command military troops’, then in fact the tank shot sends that message, and the other shot doesn’t.

if you want to say ‘this woman has no serious grasp of economic policy’, the wink does it better than a sober portrait does.

i think you are asking something impossible of the obama camp, and then clobbering them for failing to do the impossible: to come up with an image that stresses her lack of seriousness without incidentally showing her constant over-femmy self-presentation.

I don’t know if they really could have used the official portrait. She does look at least somewhat serious there, and part of the point of the ad is that she was actually a quite frivolous choice. A good way to play that up: depict her being frivolous. The official portrait doesn’t make the point that she doesn’t supply McCain’s deficiency as well.

Hmm, you both make good points. Without “quoting some babbly nonsense”, which would stretch the ad to 60 seconds or beyond, they have to use some kind of image as shorthand. And Palin being as consistent as she is, it’s going to be a femmy one.

Most campaign commercials rely on images that portray the opposing candidate in an unflattering fashion – and those images are inherently unfair, because they always reflect some momentary reflex or transitional expression captured in a fraction of a second.

I assume that Palin, on the other hand, chose that wink as an expression of her character – the way that presidential debaters have always chosen their “there he goes again” or “change you can Xerox” debate moments. I mean, Palin winked twice, right?

How can it be wrong to portray Palin’s deliberate manipulation accurately?

(I’m wondering if she cleared it with her handlers, or came up with it on her own. Neither would surprise me.)

I mighta left out the wink. But here’s something funny. Wm Kristol
(http://www.weeklystandard.com/weblogs/TWSFP/2008/10/kristol_a_mccainpalin_opportun_1.asp)
calls this an “ad attacking Palin.” The ad does not attack Palin. He says the “ad ridicules Palin’s alleged unpreparedness.” It says *nothing* about her preparedness. The ad relies *entirely* on its viewers’ having already reached conclusions about Palin that don’t fit McCain’s 11/28/07 words.

the wink is KEY, and I think clearly not sexist–I mean,who else winks? the “dumb blonde” of legend doesn’t wink. winking has nothing to do with generic gender sterotypes and everything to do with Palin’s particular lethal cocktail of unseriousness and unearned self-confidence.